Overview

Rheocles is a macOS menu bar app and a small HTTP API. You arm the streams you want — cameras, microphones, every display, individual windows, system audio — and on one cue every armed stream starts writing to its own file. Video lands as QuickTime MOV with a time-of-day timecode track; audio lands as Broadcast Wave with a matching time reference. An editor syncs them in one click, and manifest.json in the take folder agrees with the files.

It exists because OBS records one composited stream, and Pteroprompter wanted the camera, the prompter screen, the microphone and the system audio as separate files, started together, with no compositor in the way.

The shortest possible take

# the token is provisioned to a file; no pairing dialog
TOKEN="$(cat ~/Library/Application\ Support/Rheocles/token)"
H="Authorization: Bearer $TOKEN"

curl -s -H "$H" -X POST localhost:7447/takes -d '{"name":"Episode 12"}'   # → the manifest. Not recording.
curl -s -H "$H" -X POST localhost:7447/takes/$ID/start                    # the cue
curl -s -H "$H" -X POST localhost:7447/takes/$ID/stop

Every armed stream is now its own file in the take folder, and the manifest says so.

Where to go next

The pages in the sidebar are in reading order. The two that make Rheocles different from a compositor are Streams and arming — armed means live, and a stream can join a take late — and Timecode and sync — every file carries its own time.